It has a lagged effect - older polls are factored in with brand new ones - but it tends to filter out most of the noise from individual polls. Has Sanders +11.6 in NH right now, and Clinton +14.7 nationally.

No one is actually in the market to buy health care. They're in the market to buy health insurance, and their providers are in the market to sell to insurers. People don't ask the price of services, medicines, or surgeries they receive. They don't shop around multiple doctors to see who can provide something the cheapest. And they're generally shopping with their insurer's money, since they're only paying a fraction out of pocket compared to the actual cost of health care.

China already has cap and trade programs in specific metropolitan areas (Guangdong, Shenzen, Shanghai, etc etc). The problem with these policies is that they are enforced unevenly. Some cities adhere to them better than others, and sometimes well-connected companies don't have to adhere to them at all.

I'll probably get downvoted for going against the grain, but here's how I think about this issue.

Look at it this way. The current status quo, if you believe that life begins at conception like I do, is that thousands of human lives each year are being involuntarily ended by medical professionals, and all of this is completely legal.

The plight of orphans and single mothers is a serious issue, and government needs to play a role to provide for people who are in need. But is it ethical for anyone to say that these human beings are better off being killed than living out their lives, however stacked against them the deck may be? I don't think so.

It is worth understanding that /u/madam1 is a power user who submits links to political subreddits. Many of their links have an ideological bent. It's for the community to decide whether or not this is /r/truereddit material, and at the end of the day we're the ones who upvote it in the first place.

This is all going off of someone else's assumption of which deductions Romney intends to close to keep his plan revenue neutral, I guess? Either that or you just made all the numbers up.

The Romney campaign has been pretty quiet about which deductions it wants to close. And its tax plan is an across-the-board reduction, so any "tax increase" would have to come from those deductions (which again, haven't been specified).

The problem is less that 2009 was bad than that 2010, 2011, and now 2012 were all sluggish. Federal government failed to engineer an economic recovery; whether this is Obama's fault, the Fed's fault, or Congress's fault is up for debate, but clearly something did not work out the way it should have.

We can't go the way of Europe. Europe's problem is that they have a monetary union, but bad fiscal policy. Countries in trouble don't have help from Europe and can't revalue their currency to avoid economic turmoil.

On the other hand, we can easily revalue our dollar and our bond yields are as low as they have ever been. Our fiscal policy isn't fantastic, but we have the policy tools to get around that. Europe doesn't.

Right now, the RCP average is Obama+3. In 2008, Gallup had Obama+9. This election is fairly even so far, early polling isn't necessarily accurate (Obama won 2008 by 7 points). Most pollsters and politicos agree that future jobs data could significantly influence the campaign, and Europe is a wild card for everyone.

We already make massive transfer payments, to both the middle class and the poor. The bottom 40% of society receives more in transfer payments than they pay in taxes, and it's been suggested that today that percentage is closer to the bottom 60% (partially because of the recession).

So the better question to ask is "What is the best form of transfer payment," not "does GMI reduce the incentive to produce." I think GMI holds up fairly well on this point. It's a safety net, for those who need it, with relatively low administrative costs. It reduces the pressure to take immediate, low-skill work when an option for training exists, allowing for future productivity gains.